Getting Started with AIP – My Messy Journey
Alright, let me tell you how I ended up wrestling with this AIP diet thing. It wasn’t some fancy health kick, believe me. I was just feeling lousy. Like, really lousy. Dragging myself out of bed, weird aches, stomach always doing gymnastics. Went to docs, got the usual shrugs and maybe some pills that did zip. So, I started digging around online, late at night, feeling desperate. Found this thing called the Autoimmune Protocol, or AIP.
First look? Seemed completely bonkers. The list of ‘don’t eats’ was basically everything I liked. No grains, no dairy, no eggs (yeah, I read that whole debate about pastured vs. regular eggs, omega this, omega that – honestly, too much headache, just cut ’em out to be safe at first), no nuts, no seeds, no nightshade veggies like tomatoes and peppers. What was left? Meat, fish, some veggies, fruit, and weird flours I’d never heard of. Seemed impossible.
Diving In and Finding Food
But feeling bad makes you do crazy things. I decided, ‘Okay, let’s give this a shot’. Cleaned out my pantry, which was painful. Felt like throwing away my entire social life. Then came the hard part: figuring out what to actually eat. Finding AIP recipes wasn’t straightforward. You search ‘AIP recipes’, and you get all these blogs, some look good, some look like they were photographed in a dungeon.
Lots of recipes called for stuff like tigernut flour or cassava flour. Took me ages to find those in a regular store. Ended up ordering online mostly. And expensive! Man, budget went out the window for a bit. I tried to keep it simple at first. Just focused on basics.
- Breakfast: This was tough without eggs. Often ended up with leftover dinner, or maybe some sautéed greens with compliant bacon. Sometimes a smoothie with avocado, spinach, and berries. Got old fast.
- Lunch/Dinner: Lots of roasted chicken, baked fish, steamed veggies. Sweet potatoes became my best friend. Made big batches of bone broth – my kitchen smelled like a medieval apothecary for weeks. Tried making some fancy AIP bread substitute once. Total disaster. Rock hard. Straight in the bin.
The Actual Cooking Grind
Honestly, the cooking was exhausting. You can’t just grab a sandwich or order takeout easily. Everything has to be planned. I spent most of my Sundays batch-cooking huge amounts of food for the week. Chopping veggies, roasting meat, portioning stuff into containers. It felt like a second job.
Some things were okay. Simple stir-fries using coconut aminos instead of soy sauce worked well. Roasted root vegetables with herbs were decent. Ground meat with mashed cauliflower. It was… food. Edible. But rarely exciting. The lack of spices like paprika or chili powder really made things bland sometimes. Had to get creative with ginger, garlic, turmeric, and herbs.
So, What Happened?
I stuck with the strict elimination phase for about six weeks. Did it magically cure me? Nope. Not gonna lie. But some things definitely improved. The constant bloating went down significantly. My energy levels were a bit more stable, less up-and-down. Skin cleared up a bit too, which was unexpected.
The biggest thing wasn’t some miracle cure, though. It was how much I learned about what I was putting in my body. When you strip everything back like that, you really notice how food affects you when you start adding things back in slowly. That reintroduction phase was the most valuable part for me. Found out gluten really messes me up. Dairy? Not great either. Eggs? Turns out, I was okay with good quality ones, eventually. But I wouldn’t have known that for sure without doing this whole elimination thing.
It was a massive pain, super restrictive, and kind of isolating socially. But it forced me to pay attention. Forced me to cook from scratch. Forced me to understand ingredients. It wasn’t fun, but looking back, it was a necessary step for me to figure stuff out. Would I live on strict AIP forever? No way. But going through it? Yeah, it served its purpose. Just glad I don’t have to drink bone broth for breakfast anymore.
